Last Night In Soho is easily one of my favorite movies of this year and maybe of all time. A look into nostalgia and the grip that it can have on us, the Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns film takes us into the lively ’60s of London’s Soho area. Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, and more, the film ushers us into the unknown world through the modern eyes of Eloise (McKenzie).
A young fashion student who has a connection to a world outside her own, Ellie goes to bed each night and enters into the history of the room she’s renting and the Soho of days past. It’s a look at our strange connection back to decades we were not even alive during and that problematic nostalgia that continues to permeate throughout our society. Getting to speak with Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns about the film, it is clear that this was a passion project for them.
I asked both about the use of records and music to help facilitate Ellie’s love of the decade in the film, especially as someone who loves classic rock music because of my father. Edgar Wright explains his own ties to the ’60s and the influence they had on the movie:
There was an element where I thought that like if Thomasin was growing up with her grandmother, or Eloise had grown up with a grandmother that she would be into kind of like her grandmother’s taste music or listened to those records. I mean, I was always like that growing up. Cause my parents had a very small record collection. It was just one box and it was all sixties albums and they seem to stop buying albums when me and my brother were born. So they were like, no seventies albums. Cause my parents used to sort of work a lot and work through jobs and you know, so I just remember being left alone with the record player and the sixties records and just playing them over and over and over again. So then that’s where it starts. Like maybe what might be a strange obsession with a decade that you never lived in. And that would be something that I would… We love sort of disappearing back into that time through the music or through the films or through the arts. But then the longer that goes on, you start to question why you’re doing that and then start to worry that is nostalgia a retreat. Is it a failure to deal with modern life?
Wilson-Cairns went on to talk about her own connection to the 60s and the nostalgia built into the film through Ellie.
My mom was born in 1961, so she was obsessed with the sixties cause she never really got to experience them apart as a very young child. And I was very close with my grandmother and my grandfather. And I remember looking at pictures of them and trying to work out like who were they, what kind of people were they in the sixties? And I sometimes think like that nostalgia to be somewhere you’re not is also to know the people that you came from and to learn about them. And I suppose some of that is tied up in Ellie’s closeness with her grandmother.
You can watch our full interview here:
Last Night In Soho is in theaters now and is an incredible movie from the minds of Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns!
(image: Parisa Taghizadeh / Focus Features)
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